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March 4, 2010  Vol. 362 No. 9

Audio Summary of this Issue

Perspective
769-772

After the earthquake, Zanmi Lasante, the Haitian branch of Partners in Health, became the largest and one of the most important health care providers in Haiti. Tracy Kidder describes Zanmi Lasante's response to Haiti's catastrophe.

772-774

Congressional reform proposals include a new Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation intended to facilitate beneficial delivery-system changes. Robert Mechanic and Stuart Altman write that the long-term effect on the U.S. health care system could be ...

774-777

On January 25, the FDA approved liraglutide, a glucagon-like-peptide-1 receptor agonist that can improve glycemic control in adults with type 2 diabetes. Drs. Mary Parks and Curtis Rosebraugh discuss the benefits and potentially serious safety concerns ...

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Haiti has long had difficulty in protecting its children from harm. The earthquake that struck the country on January 12 destroyed much of the capital, Port-au-Prince, as it killed many government officials and United Nations (UN) workers and left as many ...

Original Articles
779-789

In this comparative-effectiveness trial, there was no significant difference in the overall survival rate between patients with shock who were treated with dopamine and those who were treated with norepinephrine. However, dopamine was associated with more cardiac arrhythmias and with a higher mortality rate among patients with cardiogenic shock.

790-799

In this randomized trial of three common treatments for childhood absence epilepsy, ethosuximide and valproic acid were more effective than lamotrigine, and adverse effects on attention were less frequent with ethosuximide than with valproic acid. These findings suggest that ethosuximide has the best efficacy and safety profile.

800-811

This community-based study of nondiabetic adults compared the prognostic value of glycated hemoglobin and fasting glucose for identifying persons at risk for clinical outcomes such as diabetes. As compared with fasting glucose, glycated hemoglobin was similarly associated with the risk of diabetes and more strongly associated with the risks of cardiovascular disease and death from any cause, adding to data about the use of glycated hemoglobin as a diagnostic measure.

812-822

Pneumococcal infection is an important cause of death and complications in adults with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, particularly in Africa. In this placebo-controlled, randomized trial involving 496 predominantly HIV-infected Malawian adults who had recently had an invasive pneumococcal infection, the 7-valent conjugated pneumococcal vaccine was found to have 74% efficacy in preventing subsequent invasive pneumococcal infection with a vaccine-associated serotype.

Review Article
823-832

Gastroesophageal varices are present at diagnosis in almost half of patients with cirrhosis, and variceal hemorrhage continues to be a lethal complication of cirrhosis. This review explains the three main challenges in clinical management: primary prophylaxis to prevent a first episode of hemorrhage, the treatment of acute bleeding episodes, and secondary prophylaxis to prevent recurrence of variceal hemorrhage.

Images in Clinical Medicine
833
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A baby girl was delivered prematurely, at 30 weeks' gestation, by emergency cesarean section owing to deceleration and no acceleration on fetal heart-rate monitoring. In addition, she had severe intrauterine growth restriction, oligohydramnios, and ...

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This 61-year-old man with diabetes presented with an ulcer of 3 months’ duration. He was unaware of any recent trauma. Close inspection of his footwear revealed an inconspicuous foreign body.

Clinical Problem-Solving
834-839
  • CME

A 58-year-old woman presented to her primary care physician after several days of dizziness, anorexia, dry mouth, increased thirst, and frequent urination. She had also had a fever and reported that food would “get stuck” when she was swallowing. She reported no pain in her abdomen, back, or flank and no cough, shortness of breath, diarrhea, or dysuria.

Editorials
841-843

Circulatory shock is a medical emergency that is characterized by hypotension and decreased tissue perfusion; if left untreated, it can lead to irreversible cellular injury and death. Hypotension associated with shock can be the result of any of a number ...

843-845

Where did our wisdom about treating epilepsy originate? The ketogenic diet came from ancient teachings. The mistaken belief that seizures were caused by sexual excess led to bromides. Modern medications are developed through screening processes and, now, ...

Sounding Board
846-850

The authors argue that physician practices should routinely collect data on the race and ethnic group of their patients. They caution against the use of these data to infer information about health-related values or beliefs, and they discuss the benefit of using these data at the population level to detect disparities in care and to improve the quality of care.

Correspondence
851-854

To the Editor: In the Veterans Affairs Randomized On/Off Bypass (ROOBY) trial, Shroyer et al. (Nov. 5 issue)1 assigned 2203 patients to receive coronary-artery bypass grafting (CABG) either with the use of cardiopulmonary bypass (on-pump CABG) or without ...

854-855

To the Editor: Sax et al. (Dec. 3 issue)1 found that abacavir–lamivudine was less potent than tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (DF)–emtricitabine among patients with human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) RNA levels of 100,000 copies per milliliter or ...

855-857

To the Editor: Mortality from adult obesity and from persistent smoking have already been reliably assessed in studies of tens of thousands of deaths.14 A common measure of obesity is the body-mass index (BMI, the weight in kilograms divided by the ...

857

To the Editor: In the review article by Verma and Mesana (Dec. 3 issue),1 mitral-valve prolapse is defined as the displacement of some portion of one or both mitral-valve leaflets into the left atrium during systole. This term was introduced in 1966 by ...

857-858

To the Editor: In the article by Desai et al. (Dec. 3 issue),1 the electrocardiogram has the characteristics of one with the right-arm and left-arm cables exchanged, resulting in the appearance of lead I as a mirror image and leads aVL and aVR exchanged. ...

858-859

To the Editor: We reported previously (Jan. 3, 2008, issue)1 that capecitabine and oxaliplatin are as effective as infused fluorouracil and cisplatin, respectively, in patients with previously untreated esophagogastric cancer that was inoperable and ...

859-860

Despite a decade's worth of exposure to health information on the Internet, the public's trust in physicians as their preferred source of health information increased from 2002 to 2008.

Points of View
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The first phase of the disaster in Haiti is now ending, with hundreds of thousands of people having died from trauma. But the second phase promises to be as cruel as the first, with deaths due to exposure, starvation, and infectious diseases. Millions of ...

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Even if the Democrats had kept their supermajority by retaining the Senate seat in Massachusetts, final passage of a health care reform bill would have seemed far from certain, given the major differences between the Senate and House bills. Congressional ...

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